Mother Trouble

‘A Sense of Myself as a Mother’: An Exploration of Maternal Fantasies in the Experience of ‘Circumstantial Childlessness’

“…These accounts generally begin with the rupture of the baby's separation from its mother at the trauma of birth (Pollock 2009), followed by further individualization via weaning, motor development, language acquisition and so forth. In Ettinger's terms this is the binary 'phallic mode' that underpins dominant psychoanalytic (and popular) assumptions of human subjectivity and relationships.…”

Rereading Winnicott's ‘Primary maternal preoccupation’

“…With regard to the birth mother, a matrixial perspective conceptualises the effects on the becoming-mother at a level that is unsymbolised and sees the prenatal/prematernal history as a continuous flow into post-natal matrixial experience, in contrast to the psychoanalytic theory that starts from the cut and separation of birth (Pollock, 2008: 11). As a result, these women's pre-occupation by something that amazes and potentially alarms them makes sense as the ongoing emotional experience of the joint matrixial encounter that is beyond the conscious knowledge of the autonomous self, that masculine gold standard of individuality: what is outside this norm is bound to have connotations of madness, just as hysteria (the Greek word for uterus or womb) connotes feminine madness.…”

“…I realised that I did not have a way into theorising women's prenatal experience that illuminated my wider question. Reading Griselda Pollock's (2008) 2 ‘Mother trouble’, I was struck by the implications of the fact that most psychoanalysis, including most object relations and relational psychoanalysis (major influences in my approach), start their inquiries at birth. In the matrixial perspective of Bracha Ettinger, artist, feminist and psychoanalyst, the continuity of pregnant and postnatal experience is of central significance.…”

“…Women are likely to be gripped by this unsettling mental state through identification with the foetus/baby, which reopens their acquaintance with their own beginnings, before separation; what Ettinger calls a ‘dynamic borderspace’ (Ettinger, 1997: 379ff), a shared matrixial borderspace (Pollock, 2008) that produces both differentiation and linking. Pollock identifies the aspect that is particular to women, ‘those of us born into and housing our subjectivities in bodies which have the potential to generate, to repeat the process of our own becoming in the matrixial severality that marks human sexual procreation’ (2008: 15).…”

“…Neither is it surprising that many women resist the matrixial because it conflicts with autonomous control. The matrixial is ‘from the beginning several, an encounter-event, co-emerging and co-affecting, between partners in difference that remain unknown to each other but share in this prebirth incest an intimacy that may lay the psychic foundations for our capacities for ethics: hospitality and compassion for the other in their otherness' (Pollock, 2008: 10).…”